


If You Ever

by TW Lewis (gardendoor)



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-06-03
Updated: 2006-06-03
Packaged: 2017-10-28 19:03:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/311206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardendoor/pseuds/TW%20Lewis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inara takes on an unusual client.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If You Ever

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Joss Whedon owns them. I'm just borrowing.

The word for a child who has lost its parents is orphan. But as far as Gabriel Tam knew, there was no word for a father who had lost his children. River would have known.

He'd seen her picture today, on a wanted poster outside the symposium on neural reconstruction at the Magellan Institute. No picture of Simon, though she was described as traveling with a man of his description. Simon was only a wanted fugitive in relation to his damned sister.

Simon was everything Gabriel could have hoped for: a first-born son, brilliant, compassionate, focused, good-looking, and blessed with the inclination to follow the family trade of medicine. River's birth was almost an afterthought: a girl-child to occupy his wife's attention, hopefully a pretty, lively young thing who would dance at all the best parties and marry some dashing, connected young man. Instead, from an early age, she became The Problem.

He first noticed it sitting by the fire one night, playing chess by himself while Simon sprawled on the carpet writing an essay his tutor had assigned and River straddled his back like a hobbyhorse. "That's wrong," said River, rolling one of Simon's toy spaceships over his shoulder. "It's F-I-E-R-Y, not F-I-R-E-Y."

"Da-ad..."

"She's right, Simon," said Gabriel, looking up from his game.

"Not that it matters," said River, hunkering down on the floor to smash two spaceships into each other over and over, "The adjectives are much too florid."

She had been three years old.

Gabriel and Regan had reacted with mixed pride and worry to their daughter's genius. She was so smart, so creative, so self-assured. At first he worried that if she outshone her older brother, he might develop some tiresome personality disorder, but the two balanced each other out perfectly, as symbiotic as a pair of twins. But a future husband would not be so amused by a wife who could run mental circles around him and didn't have the sense not to prove it in public.

The offer from the Alliance-funded program could not have come at a better time: River had just started disastrously stepping out into society, and Simon was desperately cramming for his boards. It was an exciting, challenging program, the best possible place for their misfit daughter to come into her own, and it would free them from worrying about her future and allow them to concentrate on their son when he needed them most.

Gabriel hadn't worried when River failed to write home; he remembered his own first adventures away from home and how rarely he had remembered to ease his parents' worries and tell them how he was doing. But Simon was frantic at the long silence; he wrote to her at least once a week and fretted constantly over the lack of answer.

When the silence stretched into a year, and then two years, Gabriel and Regan started to worry, and Gabriel sent out a couple of discreet inquiries, which dropped down a deep dark hole of bureaucracy and vanished without reply. And Gabriel realized that they had two choices: accept the stock story as truth, or panic and pit themselves against the Alliance in a battle that would destroy them without getting them any closer to River. River was fine. They were just keeping her too busy to write.

Simon, bright, beautiful Simon, was not so easily swayed by logic. And Gabriel was left without children, without his wife, without his life.

***

"Captain, if I could take up a moment of your time?" asked Simon.

"What's on your mind, Doc?" said Malcolm Reynolds, hoping it wasn't yet another catastrophe involving River and breakables.

"Where are we going? We need more medical supplies for the infirmary, and I need to know if it's safe to go out shopping, or whether the planet will be too backwards to have anything worth buying."

"You and River are going to have to sit tight this time," said Mal, "We're stopping on one of the Core worlds. Inara has a high-class client. You can give the list to me or Zoe, but I thought we had plenty of supplies after that stunt we pulled with the Alliance hospital. What happened, you got greedy and sold off too much?"

"No, but with our rate of injuries, we've used up a lot of sterile gauze and thread, and some of the medicines have a limited shelf life. When they expire, they'll be useless, so I want to get a fresh supply and sell off the older things to one of the outer worlds while they're still potent."

"No problem. Osiris has a good black market--"

"Osiris? We're going to Osiris?" Simon asked, suddenly tense.

"Yeah, why?"

"River and I were born on Osiris. Everyone will know our faces, what's happened to us. Half the aristocrats in Lytton City will remember that we're supposedly traveling with a Firefly and report Serenity to the Alliance."

Mal swore under his breath. Some days, hell, most days, Simon and River were more trouble than they were worth. "I'll see if I can get Inara to cancel her appointment. I'd drop you at the sanctuary with Book, but they don't take too well to women there." He moved through the ship to Inara's shuttle with Simon following anxiously at his heels.

Inara had several outfits spread out on her bed, and more hung from the ceiling.

"Inara, we need to talk," said Mal. "Simon here's just informed me that Osiris is going to be a mite ... inhospitable. It looks like we're going to have some trouble unless you cancel your appointment."

Inara's eyes flicked from Mal to Simon. "Captain, with all due respect, when I hired this shuttle from you, it was with the understanding that I could make -- and keep -- appointments with whatever clients I preferred. Between your smuggling and Simon and River's fugitive status, you've made that all but impossible. If I cancel or dissatisfy any more clients this year, I risk losing my standing in the Companion's Guild. That damages both my use to you as an ambassador and my ability to pay my rent. You'll just have to find another solution to the problem."

***

Gabriel Tam met her at the gate of his house, coding the 'open' sequence for the forcefield just as she approached. The manor was richly constructed, set far back on a fine lawn with a beautiful garden falling into disrepair out the back. It seemed a wonderful place to raise a family, but for one man living alone it must have been terribly lonely.

"Dr. Tam?" she asked. The man resembled his son only a little, by the forehead, but the similarity to River was clear: the same dark wavy hair, the softened angles of the face, the intensity of the eyes.

"And you must be Inara," he greeted her. "I admit, when I applied for a companion, I didn't expect my request would be answered by someone of your caliber. I thought that was reserved more for heads of state, not simple doctors."

"You're hardly a simple doctor," Inara assured him, "But a companion chooses her partners by their character, not their status."

"I've ordered dinner for us," he said, offering his elbow and escorting her back into the house.

Inara looked around when they came inside, not gawking at the finery, but checking for listening devices. The Alliance might have bugged the house of a man whose two children were wanted fugitives. But she saw none, and the discreet scanner in her bracelet didn't detect any either. In true companion fashion she took mental notes on everything she saw, calculating the angle of her approach. Would he prefer her to be warm or cool, sophisticated or innocent? The house had been bright with lights as she approached, and there was no hint of dust on the elegant antiques inside. Considering that the man lived alone, it spoke very strongly of his desire to keep up appearances. But the lack of servants to take her coat or serve the meal suggested his need to keep his pain private.

He pulled her chair out for her at dinner, then brought a number of covered trays to the table and sat close to her, both of them at one corner of a very long wooden table. "Do you stay close to the Core worlds, I wonder, or have you ventured out to the frontier at all?" he asked her. He took the cover off of one of the trays and placed a bowl of delicate ferns and rubyseeds before each of them.

The rubyseeds were perfectly tart, and the ferns crunched sweetly in her mouth. "For the last year or so I've actually spent a lot of time out on the frontier, but yes, before that I spent most of my time in the Core."

"What's it like out there?" he asked. "You hear the most terrible stories on the news, poverty, anarchy, disease..."

She saw the concern in his eyes. "That was what I thought as well, which is why I supported unification," she replied, "But in the last year, actually spending time out there, my opinion has changed. There is poverty out on the rim, and violence, but perhaps for those very reasons people take better care of each other out there."

He didn't say a word, but some of the tension in his eyes and body eased.

She mentally ran through topics of conversation. A doctor on the board of one of the finest hospitals in the Alliance, Tam probably wanted to get away from his work, not talk about it. His dead wife and missing children obviously made his personal life a bad conversation-starter. She eyed the elaborate chess set on an end table beside a potted plant. "That's exquisite workmanship. Do you collect them?"

His eyes lit up. "Do you play?"

She made a dismissive gesture. "A little."

He gave her a measuring look. "Promise me you'll play your best, not just lose to flatter me. If there's anything I can't stand, it's people who don't use their full potential."

He cleared the plates, brought out the soup, and brought over the fine chessboard she had admired. One side was made of very pale jade that had been treated on a molecular level to accentuate the veins of darker green and create the illusion of being made entirely of spring leaves. The other side was the gold and white of flickering fire, with a touch of sapphire at the base to complete the illusion of actual flame. The board itself was pale ash and dark walnut, with a delicate lacquered border of Chinese characters, admonitions on strategy gleaned from _The Art of War_.

Inara lost three times, but the games were lively ones. Chess and other games had been part of her companion training, and the strategies for playing well that she had learned (as opposed to the strategies for losing credibly) were designed to confound and surprise her client, unusual gambits and rare variants of classic openings.

After he trapped her in a third checkmate, Inara caught Gabriel lost in thought, staring at a little picture frame that had been turned face down. She gently covered his hand with her own. "With your permission, when I next see River and Simon, I would like to tell them about their mother. I think they'll both be sorry to hear of her passing."

He stared at her, the color draining from his face. "You've seen them? When?"

"Recently," she said. Best not to tell him the whole truth in case the Alliance ever interrogated him. She didn't want to get Serenity's crew or herself into needless trouble. They got into enough on their own.

"How are they?"

"Simon misses his old life, but River is more important to him. She's healing slowly but surely under his care. And they're among good people who look after them."

His stare deepened. "Healing?"

It was her turn to be surprised, then she realized. "Of course. They wouldn't have told you. The Alliance ... did things to River. They drove her insane. Simon says they essentially lobotomized her."

"That's insane! Why would they do such a thing?"

"I don't know. I don't even think River knows."

He pulled away from her and began pacing the room, trying to funnel the useless surge of energy. "Are they safe? Can I talk to them? How did you meet them?"

Inara considered her reply. "I'm not sure how much it's safe for you to know," she warned him. She thought over what she knew, trying to sift what was really important from what was simply dangerous. "Simon is in love. He's going about it rather badly, but she's a very tolerant person, so there's every chance that you could have grandchildren at some point, if he can keep his foot out of his mouth long enough to kiss her. She's a lovely girl, very smart, lights up the room when she walks in." She watched the emotions play across his face at the thought of grandchildren who he might never see, and dared to say, "As I said, River is doing better. I wish I could have known her before, but maybe it's a blessing to see her as she is without comparing her to something she used to be."

Gabriel shook his head. "So she's some sort of drooling idiot now?"

Inara was taken aback, unsure how to respond to his bitterness. "She's brilliant. On her good days, she's happy, she sees the world through such beautiful eyes. On her bad days, things don't make sense to her. She gets frightened and nothing calms her."

He shook his head. "Such a terrible waste. He was going to get married, you know. To the daughter of an associate of mine. Their mothers were just starting the wedding plans when he ran off. He had his whole life ahead of him, a brilliant career, a family, and she's taken it all away from him, made herself the center of attention and damn everyone else, just like she always does."

Inara stared at him across a gulf of understanding. She wasn't sure she could break the patterns of a lifetime, but she had to try, for his peace of mind and for his children. "I was there when a bounty hunter caught up with them; one of the most terrifying people I've ever met. River offered herself to him; she made it very clear that she hated what a burden she was to her brother. She thought going back would set him free. Simon attacked a trained killer to make it clear that her plan was completely unacceptable. I can see how hard it is for you to accept this, but Simon isn't whole without River, any more than she's whole without him. I've seen people die, old and young, and most of them die alone, even surrounded by people. I hope it's far in the future, but even if there isn't a living soul for miles when it happens, neither of your children will die alone as long as they have that love for each other."

His eyes went this time to a picture of his wife, and he buried his face in one hand, shoulders beginning to shake with silent pain. Softly, tentatively, Inara stood and laid her hand on his shoulder, giving him the choice to throw her out and be alone with his grief. He didn't fight her. Gently, with hands and mouth and heart, she began to give him comfort the best way she knew how.

***

It was late when she returned to the ship, long after planetary daybreak. Mal was leaning against the side of the airlock when she disembarked from her shuttle, leering at her as he always did after she had a client. "So, do you get tips for what you do, or is it just a flat fee?" he asked, trying to bait her.

Inara felt eyes on her, looked up to see River hanging from the rigging, watching her. The companion gave a quiet nod, then turned back to Mal. "I was well repaid for my trouble, if that's what you're asking," she said. "How long until we break atmo?"

"I'll tell Wash to fire it up, now that we're all aboard," Mal conceded, and went to do just that. "Good to have you back safe."

"What did you bring me?" River asked suddenly. "Children want presents when daddy goes away."

Inara beckoned, and River clambered down to drop onto the gangway beside her. Inara leaned in, smoothed River's hair back from her face, and pressed a soft kiss to her forehead.

River looked up at Inara, and for a moment there seemed to be both sense and bright emotion in her eyes. Then she ducked around the corner and was gone.

End.


End file.
